Proteins, Code & Fashion

“Feudal Japan’s sartorial laws”… this is...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 14:09:48 -0400

“Feudal Japan’s sartorial laws”… this is what happens when you study the history of fashion in Japan. Dolbeau kills it with SEO!

Just a little tidbit on the market share of Canadian-made...

Thu, 31 May 2012 14:18:00 -0400

Destination of Canadian apparel exports

US apparel market share

Just a little tidbit on the market share of Canadian-made apparel. It turns out that 84% of all clothing made in Canada is exported to the USA, accounting for only 1% of all apparel sold in the USA. This doesn’t include apparel made overseas by Canadian-owned companies.

In case you’re wondering, 80% of clothing sold in Canada is made elsewhere (not sure how much of that is made in the USA, but probably not that much). Canadians seem to buy more locally-made clothing than Americans though (per capita), which is something that we’ve noticed at Dolbeau.

Julien Smith modeling his collabo edition (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:53:58 -0400

Julien Smith modeling his collabo edition (Taken with instagram)

Today dolbeau.ca was compared to apple.com in this random...

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:58:59 -0400

Today dolbeau.ca was compared to apple.com in this random stackoverflow question. Very flattering for us all here at Dolbeau HQ.

Tie pyramid (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:39:20 -0400

Tie pyramid (Taken with instagram)

Knitting machines (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:11:29 -0400

Knitting machines (Taken with instagram)

C’est moi

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:33:03 -0400

C’est moi

Graph of Dolbeau newsletter subscribers… now all we need...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:08:53 -0400

Graph of Dolbeau newsletter subscribers… now all we need is the rest of the hockey stick :)

Sexy Dolbeau multicolor bow tie…. coming soon!

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:47:18 -0400

Sexy Dolbeau multicolor bow tie…. coming soon!

Dolbeau website in 3D… courtesy of Firefox.

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:15:20 -0400

Dolbeau website in 3D… courtesy of Firefox.

Provision & deploy a simple Django stack on Debian 6 using Fabric & Cuisine

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:06:20 -0400

Warning: This post is for people who know what Python, Django, and Debian are.

It turns out that most people ever only need a single VPS node (or less) for their Django site. When it comes to small sites, using Chef and Puppet for deployment is kind of overkill. In our previous iteration at Dolbeau I implemented Chef with the Deploy Resource. It worked alright, except for the fact that my deploys took way too long, not to mention it was super overcomplicated and scary when it failed. I wanted to convert my huge ass Chef deployment into a tiny Fabric script (with the help of Cuisine), so I did!

You can find it in a Github repo called deploy-django.

The stack is composed of:

Nginx
Gunicorn
Django
Memcached
Postgresql

Supervisord is basically optional, but you need to edit the fabfile. Right now I personally just restart guncorn using a kill -HUP during the deploy process. This seems to work fine for my purposes. I’ve included an example init script in the provision folder.

To use the fabfile, you first need to install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, edit the deploy_settings.py file:

APP_NAME = the name of your python app
APP_REPO = the git repo
APP_REPO_BRANCH = the branch you want to deploy
APP_HOSTS = a list of hosts
REMOTE_USER, REMOTE_GROUP = the linux user that should own the deploy directory on the server

DJANGO_STATIC_ROOT = the directory name of your static_root in your app
DJANGO_MEDIA_ROOT = the directory name of your media_root in your app

DEBIAN_PACKAGES = a list of debian packages to install, the default list contains a bunch of things that you may not need

DEPLOY_TREE = defines the deploy directory tree. The default deploy tree creates a /srv/<APP_NAME> for your app.


DEPLOY_TREE = {
    APP_NAME: {
        'releases': {},
        'shared': {
            'logs': {},
            'media_root': {},
            DJANGO_STATIC_ROOT: {}
        }
    }
}

Then, you edit the server config files in the provision directory. The provision directory is structured as if it is the root directory of your server’s disk and it contains basic config files for your stack. You will need to edit these files (and rename some of them) before trying to deploy, they are NOT templates.

/etc/
    rc.local
    init.d/myapp
    gunicorn/myapp.conf.py
    nginx/
        nginx.conf
        sites-available/myapp
    postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf
    supervisor/conf.d/myapp.conf
/srv/myapp/shared/settings_local.py

Then you can try to initialize, provision and deploy:

fab initialize

This will set up the required user and inject your public ssh-key for passwordless login.

fab provision

This will install the packages and set up the server config files

fab deploy

This will deploy your app!

It should all work… if it doesn’t then feel free to file an issue or fork the repo.

Photo shoot with spence (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:36:31 -0400

Photo shoot with spence (Taken with instagram)

Dolbeau photo shoot! (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:42:47 -0400

Dolbeau photo shoot! (Taken with instagram)

Pisco sours @ Big in Japan (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:25:50 -0400

Pisco sours @ Big in Japan (Taken with instagram)

Photo

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:50:40 -0400

It’s a Dolbeau super-top-secret prototype!!

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:27:56 -0500

It’s a Dolbeau super-top-secret prototype!!

Megan in action (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:01:54 -0500

Megan in action (Taken with instagram)

Bracelet designers @ Dolbeau (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:10:36 -0500

Bracelet designers @ Dolbeau (Taken with instagram)

2002 Tii x2 (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:00:30 -0500

2002 Tii x2 (Taken with instagram)

New bow tie? (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:10:16 -0500

New bow tie? (Taken with instagram)